Whencanistop – a year in numbers

Everyone does one. So that means I can too. That’s all the justification I need. No really – I don’t need anything more, just the satisfaction of knowing that everyone else is going to write about their blog in this way. Ok, I do it myself quite frequently (back in April and in October when I was on my 50th Post), so there is no reason why I shouldn’t reflect on a year of posts on this blog in numbers and what sort of traffic they have. I’ll give you the top 5 posts and why they are the top 5.

Well here are the top line figures:

4,195 visits

6,332 page views

3,546 Unique Visitors

45 posts

92 different Countries

20 Comments

I’m impressed, because I didn’t think we’d even be near this 12 months ago (86 visits in February, 597 visits in November). What I’ve got to do now is keep it up though, although I think growth like that is unlikely, so lets just hope I can keep getting 600 odd visits a month and I’ll be happy. Actually, more importantly this blog has helped raise my profile a little bit in the industry and I’m about to start a new job next week. I like to think that this blog helped me get the job if not by showing off my credentials, then by helping me further my knowledge to get those credentials. Anyway, on to the list you want to see (well, the list that I am going to write) the top five visited posts:

Back in January when Omniture bought out HBX we were all intrigued as to what was going to happen to a tool that we all knew and loved (ok, we all knew). What options did that give you if you wanted to move (or even should you move)? This post told you.

The main reason this post got so much traffic, I think, was because it was right at the beginning of the year and it was really topical. Did it get much traffic to start with? Not really – it just generally performed well throughout the year (eg in January and February it got 17 visits and 51 visits, whereas in October it got another 60). The other thing about this post is that most of its traffic has come from Google and it has been generated by an astonishing 243 unique keywords (talk about long tail on small volumes). SiteCatalyst HBX is the most common keyword, but this is going to be going down in volume soon, because fewer people are going to be searching for that.

I think I may be a bit more proud of this post than number one. Only a little bit though, if we are honest. Whilst the first post pondered the future of the industry and what you should do because of it, this post was a bit more nitty gritty. It told you how you should use conversion funnels to help improve your conversion rates and make more money.

For this post, whilst lots of traffic did come from Google again (more in a minute) I also got a fair bit of traffic from James Kelway’s userpathways blog. Links like this, whilst giving you a bit of extra traffic also provide the basis for search traffic (more links gives Google license to push your post up the rankings). In this case, the phrase Funnel analysis was the one that got me a fair bit of traffic, but lots of other funnel related terms too. I also got a bit of traffic from Google Image search (please, please, please Google, sort out how GA reports image searches). It also helped that this post was written in February, so has had a long time throughout the year to generate traffic.

More on those SiteCatalyst and HBX comparisons here. Having finally got my hands on a SiteCatalyst account, I blogged about the positives and negatives of the system compared to HBX. I also set up a few questions that needed to be answered before moving from HBX to SiteCatalyst. Big question – How do you migrate 60 odd websites and 600 odd users of the tool to a new system smoothly? No answers here.

This post took a long time to take off. Given that it was written at the end of March, it only had 26 visits by the end of July. This shows how successful it was at the end of the year. Also of note is that this post is the most entered post from direct traffic. I wonder if this was linked to in an email somewhere (somewhere in Omniture itself?). Given 71 visits from direct traffic, it was only fifth highest traffic earner from search engines (again a host of keywords, none of them particularly high).

This is another one of those posts that bucks the trend a little bit. This is another one of those helping people with their analytics projects. Specifically this one was about not just setting up campaigns in HBX (which I’d mainly been talking about before), but also in Google Analytics – something I hadn’t really ventured into before.

This was a June post, so it has only had half a years worth of traffic, compared to some of the others who were written in January. Again, this is mainly a Google related post (virtually all of the traffic in fact). This was probably written at the right time for Google to get in on the act, it was at a point where I was starting to generate more search traffic and this fit in quite well in terms of HBX key phrases.

Well it seems to me that you have voted that yes it is. HBX active viewing is the tool that you plonk on top of Internet Explorer and it tells you how many visits each of your pages has got and in fact most of the things you could ever want to know. It would have made writing this post much, much easier, but alas I don’t have HBX on this blog.

Of course it always helps if you rank highly in Google for HBX active Viewing (60 visits) and HBX active Viewer (28 visits). This was one of the success stories of 2007 that encouraged me to continue writing. I think if I had not been generating any traffic then I might have lost heart very easily, but the rest is history as they say.

6. (and honourable mentions)

Ok, I think there should also be a couple of honourable mentions in this post as well. Number six in this list was Is Engagement a metric? Remarkably this was a post written right at the end of October, but has done magnificently. A couple of reasons for this was that it was picked up by a few people at work who used it to help drive their metrics for 2009. It was also picked up by Eric Peterson on his web analytics demystified blog and by a couple of guys on twitter (Lotame and mpranikoff).

And finally – Social Bookmarking is about Brand was the only other post to generate over one hundred visits. Why did this one particularly do well? Well its because it got picked up by social bookmarking site stumbleupon. Yes, yes, the person who nominated it was me, but then again, how am I meant to investigate these things unless I actually do it myself?